Timeline of events in the 1960s
October 6, 1966
Love Pageant Soon after Timothy Leary touts the benefits of LSD in the counterculture phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," California classifies it as an illegal drug. San Francisco hippies respond with a Love Pageant to celebrate the mind-altering qualities of psychedelic drugs. |
Jan. 14, 1967
Human Be-In: Tens of thousands meet in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for a "Gathering of the Tribes" that puts the city's hippies in the national spotlight. Organizers Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen (also the co-founders of the Oracle newspaper) call the event a Be-In -- a clever reference to the successful sit in protests of the civil rights movement. |
April 5, 1967
Council for the Summer of Love: City officials worry that that San Francisco will be inundated with young people once schools let out for the summer. Hippies organize to address concerns about overcrowding and potential health and safety hazards. For thirteen year-old Sandi Stein, who would make the trip to California, "ideas of peace and love were wonderful" when so many of the families in her Boston neighborhood were grieving sons lost in Vietnam. |
June 21, 1967 Summer Solstice Celebration:
Hundreds of hippies gather on a hilltop near the Haight district in the early hours of June 21st -- the official start of summer -- to welcome what they are calling the "Summer of Love. |
October 6, 1967 Death of the Hippie:
Hippies stage a mock funeral to signal the end of San Francisco's overhyped, overattended hippie scene. As Mary Ellen Kasper will later recall, the message was, "Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live." |
The Woodstock Festival of 1969: The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 has become an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. It was a three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) that involved lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll - plus a lot of mud. The organizers of the Woodstock Festival were four young men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Mike Lang. Their plan for the Woodstock Festival was to build a recording studio and a retreat for rock musicians up in Woodstock, New York (where Bob Dylan and other musicians already lived). The idea was to create a two-day rock concert for 50,000 people with the hope that the concert would raise enough money to pay for the studio. The event was to happen in an industrial park in nearby Wallkill, New York. They printed tickets ($7 for one day, $13 for two days, and $18 for three days), which could be purchased in select stores or via mail order. The men also worked on organizing food, signing musicians, and hiring security. Turned out, the people of Wallkill, New York were extremely uncomfortable with a bunch of drugged out hippies surrounding their neighborhood. The town of Wallkill passed a law on July 2, 1969 that banned the concert. Luckily, in mid-July, Max Yasgur offered up his 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York to be the location for the Woodstock Festival. The community was forced to make it a free concert because days before the concert was suppose to start, people were camping close to it, walking in and out of the regarded area where the gate was suppose to be. An average of about 1 million people headed towards Bethel, New York, however police turned away thousands of cars. It is an estimated amount that about 500,000 people made it to the Woodstock Festival. No one had planned for half a million people. The highways in the area literally became parking lots as people abandoned their cars in the middle of the street and just walked the final distance to the Woodstock Festival. Traffic was so bad that the organizers had to hire helicopters to shuttle the performers from their hotels to the stage. At the end of the whole festival, the organizers were in debt badly, however their huge success of the concert covered most of the debt. Their debt went from over 1 million to only $100,000.